This “Apple should make a cheap iPhone” thing reminds me of the “Apple should make a cheap netbook” argument from four or five years ago. Remember this quote from Steve Jobs in 2008?

There are some customers which we chose not to serve. We don’t
know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and
our DNA will not let us ship that. But we can continue to
deliver greater and greater value to those customers that we
choose to serve. And there’s a lot of them. We’ve seen great
success by focusing on certain segments of the market and not
trying to be everything to everybody. So I think you can expect
us to stick with that winning strategy and continue to try to
add more and more value to those products in those customer
bases we choose to serve.

That clearly didn’t mean Apple was never going to ship a $500 computer — in April 2010 they shipped the iPad. Hell, as of two months ago, Apple now sells computers starting at just $329. It just means they weren’t going to ship a $500 computer until they could make one that was both a good product and profitable for the company.